Winning The Battle Against Dust Mites With Regular Bed Sheet Washing

How often do you think you should wash your bed sheets?

Some people wash their bed sheets once a week. Some decide to throw them in the washer every other week. And some even think that once a month will suffice. At DF Technical & Consulting Services Ltd., we highly recommend the weekly routine. As Marisa Ramiccio puts it on SymptomFind.com, “if you’re washing your sheets only once a month, that’s not going to cut it. Your sheets need to be washed at least every other week, but weekly is ideal.”

Why is it so important to wash your bed sheets at least once a week?

Let’s consider how often you sleep and what you leave behind when you sleep. On average, you’re in your bed approximately eight hours each night – that is, of course, if you’re getting the recommended amount of sleep for optimum health. Let’s suppose that you’re in your clothes for approximately the same amount of time each day. Usually, you’ll put them in the wash after one wear, right?

When you sleep, you leave behind hair, oil, sweat, bodily fluids and even food crumbs (for those in-the-bed snackers). We also leave behind a bunch of dead skin cells. And, as far as dust mites are concerned, this means you’ve left behind a scrumptious buffet meal! Your body sheds about a million skin cells a day. So, as you can imagine, this attracts a lot of dust mites who practically live in your bed.

What are dust mites?

Dust mites are microscopic bugs that aren’t visible to the naked eye. As Ramiccio explains, “these little things live, die and reproduce in the same bed sheets that you sleep in. The only way to keep these creatures under control is to wash your bed sheets on a regular basis. Otherwise, you may develop an allergy, or even a lowered immune system.”

On AllergicLiving.com, Dory Cerny goes into greater detail about these “cousins to the spider”. She explains that “they spend their two to four months of life eating, creating waste and reproducing. A female will lay 100 eggs in her lifetime, and each mite produces about 10 to 20 waste pellets a day…Mites eat minuscule flakes of human skin and animal dander. They can’t drink, but absorb moisture from the atmosphere.”

So how do dust mites impact our health?

The waste produced by dust mites is a known allergen that triggers asthma attacks. Because dust mites thrive on warmth and moisture, your mattress and bed sheets are often sought out as their ideal homes. The skin flakes and other above mentioned things that we all leave in our beds are consumed by dust mites, giving them more opportunities to leave behind allergy-triggering waste products.

“An average mattress contains between 100,000 and 10 million bugs,” informs Cerny, “A study in 2000 found that more than 45 per cent of American homes had detectable dust mite levels associated with the development of allergies, and 23 per cent had bedding with concentrations of allergen high enough to trigger asthma attacks.” This is why regular bed sheet washing is so important. Washing your sheets in hot water on a weekly basis is the best way to win the battle against dust mites.

At DF Technical & Consulting Services Ltd., we strongly promote the need for Canadians to live in healthy homes. This is why we’re so proud to offer Air Quality Services that work to eliminate health hazards from the air we breathe. For more information, please don’t hesitate to call us at 1-855-668-3131 or email info@dftechnical.ca.